"Abiword is a free lightweight word processing program under development
which can read and write Microsoft® Word documents. It is suitable for
typing papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth."

I think the key word is "lightweight", which means hopefully everyone will understand it has
the basic features.

The other key words are "read and write MS Word documents". With luck this should mean that
everyone will expect it to normally store documents in its own native format, and also be able
to import / export documents in the MS Word format.